Is it maybe just what Masque happens to
stock at the time?
Masque stocks what their clients want, I can just as easily
throw a dozen countrymen on an order as I can DPA in their shop. If there's a Broadway show or tour using a Countryman there's a good chance they have a few in sales inventory, but either way if there's an audio product on the market, they have no qualms selling it to me. I've bought Countrymen from Masque before, not often but it's happened when a designer has requested it.
I think it comes down to preference, and a DPA just takes less work to sound natural. However we are starting to see shifts in the market and designers are starting to leave DPA 4061's and have been picking up
Point Source CO-8WL's as the replacement. When you run them through
Smaart they have an identical
frequency response and the PS mic is 2/3 the cost.
My personal experience is that when they are mounted on the forehead you can't tell the difference between DPA and PS, but when mounted on the ear they sound different (and the PS mic requires more EQ to get it sounding natural). The PS mic is about the same cost as a Countryman B6 and I know I'm going to go with the PS mic over the Countryman every time. DPA is constantly iterating their products,
Point Source is simultaneously making weird products AND absolutely crushing the game by making a robust and killer sounding DPA clone, Countryman is being the same company with the same products they were 10 years ago hiding quietly in the corner.
At the top end of the market sounding good is one thing, but I think a lot of it comes down to both cost and customer relations -- DPA doesn't have reps directly in New York, but every time I've had issues with new DPA products there is a DPA rep in the city within a week or two visiting the production to see what's going on.
Point Source has reps that double as tech support directly in the city and they freely answer their phones when we
call so we get answers almost immediately. Countryman we are all just calling the same tech support number as everyone else. I've never personally met a Countryman rep.
A few personal anecdotes -- I did a huge new musical that busted $20k in the new D:Fine 4266
headset mics in the first few weeks of tech and previews, most of them a custom ordered variant from Denmark. We had a DPA rep onsite within a week of our
call to the rental shop to see the shortcomings of the D:Fine firsthand, while we never got the issues resolved they still sell the DPA 4066 of which the 4266 was supposed to be the direct replacement (I'll take that as a win). A few years later there was a scandal where DPA 4061's were pulling right out of their
Lemo connectors with a tiny tug (this was corroborated across a dozen large musicals). Within two weeks DPA had located the issue in their production lines, had it fixed, and sent every show a letter explaining the issues and the steps taken to fix it.
I had different issues with a huge number of
Point Source microphones when they first came to prominence in NYC, and they were taking back our
stock 1:1 in order to do R&D on our broken microphones - there was a year or two where no one trusted them but over the last 18 months I can count on two hands the number of Broadway shows and tours that have fully embraced them due to their work making the product more robust.
When the Countryman B2D was first released I did a production that broke $15k in them over the course of about 2 months, the
producer put me in charge of finding the issue and I was in touch with Mr. Countryman directly. The end result was being told we were using his product incorrectly after I explained the needs we had out of the microphones. Countryman didn't realize that Broadway seriously paints the heck out of their microphones, they offered 5 colors and they felt that should be enough for anyone. We stopped painting them and the failure rate dropped but not enough. Turned out actors who had dry skin could clog up these mics as quickly as the aerosolized paint could. Countryman insisted again we were using them wrong and that we should be putting them in wind screens full-time. They were nice enough to
send me custom 3D printed makeup caps a few weeks after the production closed. I haven't used a Countryman mic since the production closed, and I think my life is easier without them. I'm a huge fan of the Type 85 DI's though, so at least they make one product I really like.
I'll
throw in
Sennheiser, because why not? They sort of killed their reputation as a go-to mic in a quick 2-fold process: 1. Killing off the MKE-2 Gold which was the go-to choice when we needed something crazy robust and durable and 2. When they started "blue-banding" their microphones to show compatibility with the new 6000 and 9000 series wireless. The blue-banding changed the tolerance from +/- 3dB to +/- 6dB across all frequency ranges, we started buying 30 at a time to pluck out the 10 that sounded closest to each other and
send back the unused 20. At a certain
point it just isn't worth the up-front cost or the time and the
Point Source proved to be just as robust as the Sennheisers. That being said, the MKE-1 and MKE-2 have very unique tonal characteristics that still make them ideal for certain performers in certain circumstances and are still a very useful tool in the mic toolbox.
I am personally not a fan of the microdot
connector from DPA particularly for high action musicals, but they certainly sound nice.
99% of the mics you're buying out of Masque/
PRG/Sound Associates are terminated to 3-pin
Lemo for use with the majority of the transmitters they rent. About the only mic I can remember renting from any of the shops that is native Microdot is the 4099 but only so it can connect to its preamp.